Good morning Jack, it's June 2nd and it's 718.
AMI didn't sleep much. That's becoming a boring thing
to say, isn't it? I'm starting to bore myself
Jack. I could hear it when I talk to
you. However, morning it's the same
thing. I didn't sleep and I had a dream
and something hurts, something was strange or something was
standing too close or not standing where it should have
been at all. I should start lying just to
keep the both of us interested. Good morning, Jack.
I slept beautifully and I woke up so well rested, so soft and
normal. The birds were singing and my
coffee tastes like coffee and my ankles look like ankles and not
like somebody left fingerprints under my flesh.
There, that was nice, wasn't it? Anyway, I didn't sleep, Jack.
I kept thinking about what Gordon said.
I know I shouldn't, and I know that's what he wants.
People like him say things like that because they want to crawl
inside your head and sit there with their muddy boots up on the
furniture. They want you turning every
sweet thing over and over in your hands until you've rubbed
the shine off of it. I hate saying it out loud.
It sounds worse in my voice than it did in his, maybe because
when he said it, it sounded like something being delivered, like
a message that had been written down somewhere else, and he was
just the one unfortunate enough to bring it to my window.
He is not a messenger, Jack. He is Gordon.
He is the strange little man at the steelhead who stares too
long and stands too still and says awful things to women in
parking lots after dark. That's all he is.
Dennis's hands were kind to me. They were.
I know what kindness feels like. I'm not stupid.
God, listen to me. I hate this.
I hate that I'm sitting here in my kitchen, in my nightgown,
defending a married man's hands to a tape recorder.
I have the dinner shift tonight, Jack, which means I have the
whole day to sit around and sink myself into something ugly
before I even have to put my uniform on, and that feels
dangerous. No one should leave me alone
with my own head this long. It starts making things, and it
starts taking perfectly ordinary thoughts and dressing them up in
wet clothes and leaving them in corners.
Anka isn't here. I checked the porch when I woke
up. His towel is still there, folded
a little at one corner from the wind, and his food bowl is still
near the door. There are a few pieces left in
it, swollen soft from the damp air, but he isn't there.
I called for him once, quietly, and then a little louder, and
then I felt stupid and stopped. Cats disappear.
That's practically half of being a cat.
They come and go, and they look a little insulted when you ask
where they've been, as if having a concern for another living
creature is an embarrassing habit that I should have grown
out of. Still, I don't like it.
The penny is gone, too. Finally.
I don't know what happened to it.
Now there's just a darker round spot on the porch board where it
used to be, like the wood remembers it.
I stood there looking at the little circle for too long.
I'm going to go try to eat something.
I'm going to go try to be normal and try very hard not to think
about hands today. I'll talk to you later.
Jack. Jack, it's 106 PMI went into
town. I needed aspirin and some
cigarettes, which I know you would have given me a look for
if you were here, but you're not, so I get to be a little
self-destructive without commentary.
It's not raining today, and it's not sunny either.
The sky has that flat white grey look it gets sometimes where
everything underneath it looks a little too exposed.
I don't like days like this, Jack.
The light makes everyone look tired.
I took the old church road into town because I didn't feel like
passing the steelhead. Not because I'm afraid, just
because I'm tired of giving certain places the satisfaction
of being noticed. There was a deer dead off of the
shoulder near the bend. Not fresh, but not really old
either. It was laying on its side with
its legs folded in wrong, like it tried to kneel and then
changed its mind halfway down. One of its eyes was open.
I tried not to look at it too long because dead animals always
make me feel guilty, even when I have nothing to do with it.
But somebody had put flowers around it, Jack.
That's why I slowed down. Not bouquets or little plastic
wrapped grocery store kind that people leave on the side of the
highway with teddy bears and candles and sad little ribbons.
These were wildflowers, and they were all upside down, Jack.
Every single one of them. The stems sticking straight up,
petals pressed into the dirt around the deer like they were
being made to pray. I actually pulled over.
I don't know why. I sat there with the engine
running and I stared at it through the windshield.
A truck passed by me and the driver didn't slow down.
He didn't even look. He didn't do anything that made
me feel less alone with the dead deer and its little upside down
garden. Maybe it was kids.
Kids do strange things, Jack. People in Cedar Bend do strange
things when they're bored. Bored I'm here is practically a
craft project. Give someone enough rain and
nowhere to go and they will start building little rituals
out of flowers and roadkill and call it a joke.
That's all it was. It was a joke.
A disgusting one, maybe, but still.
It was a joke, right? I didn't get out of the car.
I thought about it. I thought about turning one of
the flowers right side up. Just one.
But then I thought maybe that was exactly the sort of thing
you shouldn't do. Not because I believe in any of
that. I don't.
I drove away and I got my aspirin and I got the
cigarettes. I went and got coffee, even
though I had coffee at home, because sometimes coffee made by
someone else feels a bit more medicinal.
I looked for Anka on the way back, which is stupid.
He's a cat. He doesn't take the roads into
town to run errands. But I looked anyway.
I didn't see him. I need to start getting ready
for work soon. My ankles are hurting like they
want attention. I don't have any attention to
spare. I'll talk to you after my shift.
Jack. Jack, it's 10:41 PM.
I'm home. I haven't taken off my uniform
yet. I came in, locked the door, and
I checked the porch for Anka, and I just sort of stood in the
kitchen with my purse still on my shoulder, like I'd forgotten
how houses work. Anka's still gone and the bowl's
there and the towels there, and they hate how much it bothers me
how empty everything seems. Work was strange.
Not the loud kind of strange or dramatic strange.
Nobody came in covered in river mud, and no one screamed.
No lights burst, and no one dragged wet hands across the
windows. So I suppose by recent standards
it was almost peaceful. But it was strange.
Rosemary wasn't there. She called in again.
Suzanne said. Her voice sounded rough on the
phone, like she had a sore throat, maybe, or like she'd
been crying. Suzanne didn't say that last
part. I did, in my own head.
That's the problem with thinking too much.
You start finishing other people's sentences with things
they never meant to say. Dinner was slow, the kind of
slow that makes the whole diner feel staged.
The tables and the ketchup bottles and the napkin
dispensers were all waiting for something to begin, but they
didn't know their cues yet. A family passing through came in
around 6, two adults and a little girl with one of those
plastic bead necklaces. You win out of machines.
She kept chewing on it, and her mother kept telling her to stop.
The little girl stared at me every time I passed by.
Not like Gordon though. Not even like a creepy child
from a movie or something. Just with this blank, curious
little face. Then when I sat there, checked
down, she said, you have dirt on your shoe.
I looked down and there was nothing on my shoe.
Her mother laughed and said, oh, she's been saying odd things all
day, don't worry, like that explained anything.
Or maybe it did. Children are strange.
Maybe everyone just forgets because they're small and sticky
and sometimes they're kind of cute.
I was glad when they left, though.
After that it was just regulars. Missus Gardner came in and she
had a salad, but she picked through it as if she was
searching for a buried secret. Mr. Nemec came in for coffee and
pie cherry as usual. He told me Dennis finished his
truck this morning and that he did a good job.
And then he winked at me like that was supposed to mean
something more than the fact that his truck now started
properly. I pretended not to understand
the wink. I'm getting good at that.
Frederick was in the kitchen tonight.
Frederick with just the K? I know I've explained that
before, but I still feel like you should appreciate how
ridiculous it is that the junco has 2 cooks named basically the
same thing. Frederick with just AK always
looks like he has heard bad news 5 minutes before he walked in.
Maybe he has, or maybe that's just his face.
He was scraping burnt cheese off of the grill and I was putting
in an order for a BLT with no tomato, which I think should be
illegal, but people have the right to ruin their own
sandwiches, I guess. But Frederick said shame about
Dennis's wife out of the blue and casual, as if he was saying
shame about the weather. I stopped and I looked at him
with maybe too sharp of a stare. I don't think he noticed that
first. Or he did notice and he did what
people do here, which is keep doing whatever ordinary thing
their hands were doing. So the terrible sentence has
somewhere normal to land. I said Lila, as if Dennis had
another wife tucked away somewhere.
Frederick made this little sound.
It wasn't really a laugh, and it wasn't a sigh.
He just pushed air through his nose.
He said, yeah, taking off like that.
I felt sick so fast it was almost impressive.
A cold, mean little knot grew in my stomach, heavy and large.
I said. She left and Frederick looked
over at me, then only for a second.
He had the scraper in one hand and the towel over his shoulder,
and the grill light made one side of his face look almost
green. He said, yeah, that's what
people are saying. I asked when, and he shrugged.
He just shrugged at me, like it was all nothing to him, Like I'd
asked how old the man he's was, and then he said it depends on
who's saying it. And I hated that, Jack.
I hated it so much I could feel my throat closing around the
next breath. I said, what does it mean?
But he just went back to scraping the grill, and the
sound was awful. Metal against metal, too sharp.
But then he said men get strange when women leave.
Or maybe women leave because the men get strange.
I never know which order that goes in.
And then he slid the scraper under a strip of burnt cheese
and flicked it into the trash. And that was it.
And he didn't look shaken up by it, and he didn't even lower his
voice as he spoke. He didn't act like he just
handed me something heavy and wet and asked me to carry it
barehanded. Or maybe he didn't know he had.
Maybe he really was just talking because that's what people do.
People talk. And that's what I keep telling
myself. People talk and gossip and they
say weird things because not everyone understands that words
can bruise. But Jack Dennis never told me.
He never said Lila left. He let me ask about her like she
was still at home, being not much for company lately.
And he let me say, oh, what about Lila?
And when he told me he wasn't leaving me alone, he said Lila
isn't going to mind. Lila isn't going to mind.
What? Because she's gone?
Because she left? Because she couldn't mind?
No, no, I don't like that. I don't even like the idea of
the thought. I finished my shift and I don't
really remember the rest of it. I carried plates and I refilled
coffees and then I smiled at people with my mouth and maybe
not even the rest of my face. At some point I burnt my finger
on a mug because I picked it up too fast and I didn't feel the
heat until it already happened. Jack.
I keep thinking about Lila, about how long she's been gone,
about the mug in Dennis's office with the faded blue flowers and
the old lipstick staying on the rim.
About the way he said she's not much for company lately, as if
she were just in another room, like she was still close enough
to disappoint him by staying quiet.
When I got home, I checked the phone immediately, and I don't
know why. Maybe I thought it would be
unplugged again. Maybe I was just hoping it would
be. But it wasn't.
I'm going to call Dennis, and I know I shouldn't.
I know this is the sort of thing that I should ask face to face
in daylight, with both of us standing somewhere public and
sensible. But if I wait until morning,
I'll spend all night making monsters out of the spaces
between things I know and things I don't know.
I need to hear him say it. I need to hear Dennis make it
sound ordinary. I need him to be someone I can
trust. Jack, I'll talk to you later.
Jack, it's 11:18 PM now. I called him Dennis.
I called the repair shop first, which was stupid because of
course he wasn't there this late.
The phone rang and it rang and rang until it started to feel
less like a sound and more of a punishment for being stupid and
dramatic. And then I called his house.
I almost hung up before the 1st ring finished, but he answered
on the 2nd and he sounded awake. That bothered me for some
reason. I think I wanted him to sound
sleepy. Innocent people sound sleepy at
11:00 at night, don't they? They answer the phone confused
and a little annoyed and say things like do you know what
time it is? But he just said hello, clear
and quiet, just that one simple word like he'd been sitting
close to the phone waiting. I said it's Holly.
He said I know. I asked how he knew and he
didn't answer right away, and then he said who else would call
me this late and that made sense and I hated that it made sense.
There was some static on the line, not much, but just enough
to make his breathing sound further away than it should have
been. I asked him why he didn't tell
me. Lila left.
There was no warming up to the question, I just blurted it out
and I think I surprised the both of us.
He went quiet long enough that I actually looked at the phone
like I might see his silence sitting on the receiver.
And then he said who told you that Not uh, what are you
talking about? Or no she didn't or oh, I was
going to tell you no, none of those, just who told you that?
And that's when my stomach did that cold little drop again.
I said does it matter? And he sighed, not really
irritated sounding more just tired.
And I could picture him so clearly it made my chest ache
for him. One hand over his eyes maybe, or
rubbing his mouth, sitting in the dim little kitchen of his
where I've never been, but I can somehow imagine.
Anyway, he said no, no, I guess it doesn't.
I asked is it true? And he said yeah, 1 little word,
plain as a nail, and I waited for more but he didn't give me
anything else. So I said when and he was quiet
again and I hated how much of the conversation was quiet.
He said a while ago and I almost laughed, I really did.
I almost laughed a while ago, as if that meant anything, as if
time had been behaving well enough lately for me to accept a
vague little offering. Like a while ago, I said, what
does that mean? And he said it means I didn't
want to talk about my wife with you, and that hurt.
It shouldn't have hurt. It was a fair thing to say,
maybe even a decent thing to say.
There are lines, aren't there? There should be.
Granted, I've crossed many of those lines and so did he, but
they're still there and it still hurt.
And then I said you let me think she was there.
And he said he didn't mean to, but then I said you said she
wasn't much for company lately. And then he was silent again for
a while. And then he said softer.
She wasn't. And I didn't know what to do
with that. I still don't.
I asked if she left him and he said yes.
And then I asked if she took her things and he said some, some
Jack. I hate that word.
Some is worse than yes. Some is a drawer left open and a
coat still on the hook and a toothbrush by the sink.
Some is a person leaving in a way that doesn't quite finish.
I asked where she went and he said I don't know.
He said it too fast. Or maybe not too fast and maybe
I'm just being unfair. Maybe when someone leaves you,
you don't really know where they go.
And I'm starting to think that's just part of people leaving
Jack. I asked if he had called anyone,
her friends or her family. And he said she's done this
before. And that should have made me
feel better, but it didn't. I said she left before.
And he said yeah. And his voice sounded different
then, flatter, not really angry or sad, but finished and done.
I said, for how long? And he said, Holly, just my
name, maybe like a warning or a plea.
I couldn't tell. And I don't know which one is
worse. And then he said, I don't want
to do this on the phone. I almost asked him to just come
over. The words were right there,
sitting so close to the edge of my tongue I could taste them.
I wanted him here, Jack. God help me, Jack.
I wanted him here so badly. I wanted him standing in my
kitchen, making the room feel occupied.
I wanted his hands on the counter and I wanted his voice
without the static between us. I wanted him to look me in the
face and explain everything in a way that made me feel foolish
for being afraid. But then I thought about Gordon
and I thought about Lila, and I thought about the mug with the
blue flowers and the lipstick. So I said not tonight.
And he didn't say anything for a second.
And then he said all right, and he asked if I was angry.
I said no. Then quieter, he said I'm
worried about you, Holly. And I said I was fine.
I almost laughed when I said it. I'm so tired of saying that,
Jack. I'm so tired of it that I hung
up before either of us could say anything else.
And the house felt unbearable after.
Like the call had filled it with too much air and now there
wasn't any room left for me. I checked the porch again and
there's still no ANCA and I checked the locks and everything
was safe but everything felt horrible.
I think I need to go for a drive.
I'm not going to go far. I just, I just need to go out.
I need to drive somewhere long enough to get my head quiet.
I'll bring you with me, Jack. Jack, it's 12:18 AM now and I'm
driving and I know it sounds stupid because it is stupid.
I should be home. I should be home in bed with the
door locked and the windows latched, and I should have my
shoes by my bed like a sensible woman expecting the need to run.
But I couldn't sit in that house anymore.
The quiet was too loud. And that sounds like something
someone says when they're trying to be poetic, but I mean it
exactly as it is, Jack. The quiet was loud in the walls.
It was loud in the sink, in the corners of the rooms where the
lamp light didn't reach. It was loud everywhere.
I didn't really decide to drive toward the coast.
I just kept taking roads that weren't home.
I don't even know how far I've driven.
The road signs look different at night.
Or maybe I'm just what Jack? What is it doing?
Looks like clear skies tonight, we're below 48.
Tomorrow we'll see scattered clouds moving in from the coast
and. Whoever borrowed the 30th?
Please return it please. Shit.
Oh God. Oh my God.
Jack, did you hear? No, of course you didn't hear
that. You're a tape recorder.
You hear what I hear, but you don't.
Christ, that was he said I'm not making this up.
I'm not. I know I'm not imagining this.
I can't be. I know I'm not because I almost
ran myself into a ditch over it. And that feels like a dramatic
reaction to something that I apparently imagined I should
turn off the radio. I I should turn off the radio.
This is insane. I'm being insane.
It was a radio bit maybe right, Right.
It's just a bit. It was one of those strange
local station things. Maybe they said the 30th like
like a birthday or an anniversary or.
You're listening to KCBN keeping Cedar Bend awake whether he
likes it or not. Oh, absolutely not there.
OK, No, no, I don't like that. I don't like that at all.
Oh, God, Jack, the car is too quiet now, and that's somehow
worse. Of course it's worse.
I should turn around. I know I should.
I should go home and lock the door and pretend I never heard
that and sleep like a normal person with normal problems and
normal ankles and a normal mind. But I am closer to the coast now
than I am to home. I'll talk to you when I get
there, Jack. Jack, it's 12:52 AM.
I'm at the beach and I don't know what I expected.
That's not true. I think I expected it to help.
That sounds stupid now that I'm standing here with my coat
wrapped tight around me in sand, already in my shoes.
But I thought the ocean would feel bigger than all of this.
Bigger than Cedar Bend and bigger than Dennis and bigger
than missing days and missing wives and strange men that say
strange things in parking lots. I thought if I stood in front of
something this enormous, maybe my life would feel smaller in a
comforting way. But it doesn't.
The ocean is too loud, and the water just sounds close.
Even though the tide is far out. I can see all this dark, wet
sand stretching between me and the edge of the surf, smooth and
shining like something skinned. The waves are breaking way out
there, but the sound is right here.
The sound's at my feet and in my teeth and the river feels like
something that knows my name, but the ocean feels like
something too old to need it. There are no seagulls and I know
it's night, but still, there should be something.
Birds or bugs or people parked in cars doing things they
shouldn't. Maybe some drunk teenagers
throwing bottles or someone's dog barking at the dark because
dogs are smarter than us and know when the dark deserves to
be barked at. But there's nothing Jack, just
water and sand. I walked down from the pull off
with my flashlight from the glove compartment.
The batteries are weak so the lights keep yellowing at the
edges, making everything look sickly.
There are flowers in the sand, Jack.
I don't know why there's not many.
There's just a few here and there.
Wildflowers, like ones around the deer.
They're stuck upside down in the wet sand, the stems in the air
and their petals buried. I should pull one out.
No, no, I shouldn't pull one out.
I'm learning. Maybe.
Or maybe I'm getting worse. There are footprints too, Jack.
At least, I think they're footprints.
They start at the waterline and come up the beach a little ways
and then stop. There's no trail going back, and
there's no person, just these dark impressions in the sand
that don't look right. They're too far apart, maybe
even too deep, like whoever made them was very heavy or very
tired, or maybe even didn't quite understand how walking's
supposed to work. I'm not going closer.
I'm saying that for your benefit and mine, Jack, I am not going
closer. There's something pale near the
surf. I think it's driftwood or
probably just a plastic bag. But the problem with probably is
that it leaves too much room. For a second I thought it was a
person, and my mind wanted me to think it was Lila.
I don't even know what Lila looks like well enough for that.
I've seen her. Obviously Cedar Bend is too
small not to see everyone eventually, but she's one of
those women I never really looked at because looking felt
rude because she was attached to Dennis and looking at her felt
wrong, like I was violating her. She had dark hair I think, or
light brown. Or maybe I'm making that up.
Isn't that awful to be frightened for a woman and not
even know what her face looked like?
Correctly. The pale thing moved.
No, No, it didn't. The water moved around it, and
that's different. I'm going to walk back to the
car. I shouldn't be here.
I'm going home. Jack.
Jack, there's a radio in my car. Just turned on.
I'm not in the car, Jack. I'm 10 feet away from it.
Maybe I left it on. No, no, I turned it off.
I know. I turned it off.
It's that same song, that old song, Jack.
I hear. I hear it through the closed
doors. That's not possible.
The keys are in my pocket, Jack. And now they are in my hand.
The keys are in my hand. There you are.
For those of you driving home tonight, Please remember to
check your back seat, your mirrors and shape, your absence
left behind. Hey CBN, we keep what keeps you.
Jack, I'm leaving. I'm leaving right now.
Jack, it's 1:34 AM and I'm driving home.
I'm so close to home, I'm almost there.
I don't want to talk but I think if I stop talking any longer
I'll start hearing the radio even though it's been off.
So I'm talking. The road looks different at
night and I know that sounds ridiculous.
I know it's the same Rd., it's the same reflective light
shining up like animals eyes with headlights hitting them,
but everything looks like it's been moved a little.
Not enough to get lost, just enough to make home feel less
guaranteed. I passed by the deer again, the
one with the flowers. I slowed down even though I
didn't mean to. The deer is still there.
The flowers are still upside down, but now there are more of
them, and I know there are. There was maybe 12 this
afternoon, maybe 15. Now there are dozens all around
it, in the ditch and on the shoulder, and some stuck in the
cracks of the pavement, the stems up and the petals down,
like something is blooming wrong from the road.
One of them was right in the middle of my lane, a little
white flower, and I drove over it.
I did not swerve, Jack, and I am proud of that.
Maybe, or maybe I am ashamed. I don't know.
I need to go home and I need Anka to be on the porch, and I
know that's silly. I know a cat is not an answer to
these problems, but I need him there.
I need one living thing to look at me like I am being dramatic.
I'll talk to you when I'm home, Jack.
Jack, it's 1:58 AM and I am home and Anka is here.
He's on the porch, he's sitting right in front of the door like
he has been here waiting for me. And I was so relieved when I saw
him that I almost started crying when I turned off the car and I
am not proud of that. I got out and I said his name
like an idiot, and he looked at me with that little flat cat
face like he couldn't imagine why I'd be so emotional about
his schedule. And I dropped the keys on the
porch, that's how badly I was shaking Jack.
But I bent down to pick them up and Anca came over and rubbed
against my leg. And Jack, he had sand in his
fur, not dirt, and it wasn't dust.
It was sad. I felt it under my fingers when
I touched his back, little gritty pieces caught in the fur
near his shoulders and more on his paws.
Damp sand was stuck between his little toes and I stood there
with my hand on him and my mouth open like I had forgotten what
words were for. He wasn't with me.
He was not in my car or at the beach.
He was gone all day, Jack. He purred that deep, pleased
little engine sound like he'd done something good.
And I kept thinking about Lila, and I keep thinking about
Dennis, saying she took some of her things, just some.
Some And I keep thinking about that mug in his office and I
keep thinking that maybe he No, no, I am not saying that.
Not tonight. I don't want to.
I don't Jack. I need to go to bed.